Collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe make largest donation of contemporary art in Vancouver Art Gallery history
Works by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, William Kentridge, Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, and Jeff Wall amid $10-million collection
Robert Rauschenberg, Sea-Cow Treaty (Spread), 1977, cloth, silk, paper, transfer images, metal plates, metal taps, metal buckets (joined by single handle), electrical wiring, mounted on wood, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Promised Gift of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/CARCC Ottawa, Photo: Vancouver Art Gallery
THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY has just announced a historic gift of 122 artworks featuring some of the major names in contemporary art from the last half century.
Local collectors Brigitte and Henning Freybe have made a donation of pieces worth more than $10 million. VAG CEO and executive director Anthony Kiendl says the collection includes “some of the most important European artists in the last 50 years”. It also features a who’s who of contemporary local names, like Beau Dick, Stan Douglas, Geoffrey Farmer, Rodney Graham, Brian Jungen, Kathy Slade, and Jeff Wall.
“This is the largest donation of contemporary art in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s history,” stressed Kiendl at a press conference yesterday evening. “The Freybe collection is diverse and wide-ranging—materially, geographically, and conceptually—and at its core, it honours the creativity and knowledge that artists produce. This acquisition will reshape the gallery’s holdings of local and international art and add significant works by major figures from the contemporary art world.”
Highlights from the gift will feature in an exhibition called Postcards from the Heart: Selections from the Brigitte and Henning Freybe Collection, running April 18 until October 5. Featuring more than 30 of the Freybe’s most significant works, Postcards from the Heart will be the largest exhibition dedicated to the Freybe collection presented at a public museum, bringing together paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and works on paper from the 1960s to today.
Julie Mehretu, Six Bardos: Luminous, 2019, 19-colour, 2 panel aquatint, Collection of Brigitte and Henning Freybe, Photo: Ollie Hammick, Courtesy of the Artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and White Cube
Selections of the exhibition will include a sculptural wall-based work by American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Titled Sea Cow Treaty (Spread) (1977), Rauschenberg’s assemblage also encompasses a working water feature with twinned taps that emit red and blue water into conjoined buckets. It will mark the first time the work is shown in a museum setting.
“Gifting our collection to the Gallery and investing in its future is our way of giving back to this important community. It is a gesture of love to the art world,” the Freybes said in a statement today.
Other works amid the donation explore everyday materials, such as Tara Donovan’s 2004 piece Toothpicks, a free-standing minimalist cube assembled from hundreds of thousands of wooden toothpicks, and Wolfgang Laib’s Milkstone (1992–95), a sculpture made out of a slab of pure white marble that’s topped with a smooth, reflective surface of milk.
Some speak to deeper socio-political themes. South African artist William Kentridge’s Refugees (1. God’s Opinion is Unknown; 2. Leaning on Air), from 2018 to 2021, is a monumental collage of woodblock prints portraying a procession of migrants, while Christian Boltanski’s sculpture Réliquaire, from 1990, is an ode to the lives lost to the Holocaust.
The Freybes have been collecting artworks since the 1970s, and the exhibit will feature some of their personal archives—such as a photo of Brigitte with Rauschenberg shown at the VAG last night. The collectors have played a major role in championing contemporary art in the city since Brigitte Freybe cofounded the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver in 1972. In 2015, the couple founded Griffin Art Projects to give back to the community. Henning is the retired chairman and founder of Freybe Gourmet Foods Ltd. 
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